So I got a new helmet after far too many years, a Shoei Neotec-2! I used to use a flip helmet many years ago but this is really in a different league. And yes Darren the anthracite colour is excellent!
But first, before wearing it I spent a couple of hours photographing it. To be honest I may yet have to revisit this shoot before I wear the thing! There are a couple of things I want to tweak in the image but this is work so far. As ever my approach is to get the shot in camera rather than using Photoshop.
So the first step was to create the white outline of the helmet shell. This is achieved with a masked softbox, basically some black foam-core hung over the front panel leaving a bright frame, the card creates the dark for the image background, the bright frame creates the outline around the helmet.
I then moved on to the front of the helmet which is lit with a strip softbox firing through a sheet of diffusion paper, I’ve got a roll of it and hung the roll from a c-stand gobo arm.
The the side of the chin bar was lit with a strobe bouncing off a large sheet of perspex, it was the largest white thing I had to hand.
The top vents are lit with a snoot firing onto a sheet of poly-board sitting over the helmet. The snoot had a grid then some diffusion over pegged it with a C-47, just a bit of tracing paper but it worked so why-not?
To my eyes there’s still work to do on this, but I was out of time today, an interesting challenge though?